Technology Race for U.S. : Superconductors Pose Puzzles for Engineers
When the arcane topic of superconductivity vaulted recently from the front pages of newspapers to the editorial pages and finally to mention on comics pages, a social watershed of sorts was crossed.
As Mary L. Good, the president of the American Chemical Society and a devotee of a topic long considered a backwater of chemistry and physics, viewed it: “We’ve arrived.”
Yet, if superconductivity and the men and women who pursue it have ridden into the public consciousness on a wave of speculation about levitating magnetic trains and ultra-powerful computers, the new superconductors themselves may be a long time in reaching the marketplace.
In the laboratory, scientists found eight months ago that the exotic ceramic materials lose their resistance to electricity and repel magnetic fields at temperatures within the range of those used in commercial refrigeration and other technology.
Conference on Discovery
The 1,200 scientists, government officials and business executives at a federal government conference Tuesday and Wednesday on how to hasten superconductor development seemed generally to agree that these materials pose a formidable manufacturing challenge that probably will take years to overcome.
In the meantime, some of these experts are concerned that the United States risks losing the worldwide race to cash in on the superconductors if government and industry support for the mundane job of mass-producing them proves as fickle as public interest and media attention.
“They will change our lives. The question is when,” said Sibley Burnett, a research executive with GA Technologies in San Diego, whose firm is already manufacturing superconducting magnets by current techniques.
“I don’t think this will be two years from now, and probably not five,” Burnett predicted. “More likely, it will be 10 years when it really begins to take off in the marketplace.”
Many scientists, among them Good, a research executive at Allied Signal Co., say they have an exhilarating sense that the usually lengthy period between a scientific discovery and its wide commercial application is rapidly being telescoped in the case of the new superconductors.
Development Time Shrinking
For one thing, the pace of technological evolution has quickened in recent decades. Nearly a quarter-century elapsed between the invention of the vacuum tube and the use of radios in millions of homes in the 1930s, but only seven years spanned the time between invention of the transistor in 1947 and the first mass-marketing of transistor radios.
Moreover, superconductor technology--expensive and cumbersome as it is with currently available metals--has already found applications ranging from medical imaging machines to research instruments that support a $100-million annual market. Scientists and entrepreneurs alike see this market base as an eventual launching pad for wider application of cheaper materials that work at higher temperatures, as the new ceramics promise to do.
The government conference, however, produced an apparent consensus that three sets of obstacles lie in the path of a commercial superconductor revolution.
One is the physical character of the new superconductors themselves. Putting them to use means turning brittle ceramics into flexible wire, tape and thin films for electronic applications. Laboratory varieties produced so far are incapable of carrying sufficient electric current for most uses, although major strides have been made in recent months.
The manufacturing challenge is more than a matter of finding processes that are cheap and reliable, researchers said. John Rowell of Bell Communications Research said that if superconductors are to be combined with semiconductors for use in computers and other microelectronic applications, compatible methods will have to be found for processing these two dissimilar materials together without destroying one or the other.
“We’re still in the discovery phase,” John Hulm, a leading superconductor researcher at Westinghouse Electric Corp., said. “The technological phase is still in its infancy. What is needed is a massive materials-engineering effort.”
A second major obstacle to commercial application, in the view of many experts, is the embarrassing but tantalizing inability of theoretical physicists and chemists to explain convincingly why the new materials work as superconductors.
Not least among the ranks of the puzzled is Robert R. Schrieffer of UC Santa Barbara, who shared the 1972 Nobel prize for physics with John Bardeen and Leon C. Cooper for working out a comprehensive theory of superconductivity. Schrieffer cheerfully acknowledges that experimentalists are turning out samples of the new superconductors with the instinct of modern-day Edisons, while “no one knows what’s going on.”
Challenge to Understand
“The primary challenge is not a technological challenge at all,” Bell’s John Rowell said. “It is to understand the properties of these materials. We cannot create new technologies without knowing what we are making them from.”
The third pitfall in the path of a superconductor revolution has more to do with sociology than technology. Several leaders in research on the new materials said they were both amazed and gratified at the high level of public interest, but concerned about what will happen when the public gets bored with the subject of superconductors.
To compete with Japan and Western Europe in the race to commercialize the new superconductors, National Science Foundation director Erich Bloch observed, will require the same patience and persistence that Japan has shown in pursuing new technologies over the long haul.
“If we do not show the same patience,” Bloch warned, “then other countries will reap the benefits of the work of our laboratories.”
